How do children overcome hazardous experiences to succeed in life? What can be done to protect young people at risk from trauma, war, disasters, and other adversities? Learn about the importance of fostering resilience in children at risk.
During this course, participants will: learn how trauma can affect children and the systems they depend on, gain insight into core concepts, research methods and lessons learned in last 50 years of resilience research, learn how research is being applied in the real world through interventions that promote resilience, and engage in discussions with others who are working with children at risk around the world
Participants are welcome to take the MOOC at no cost or to register for a Course Certificate ($49). Those who register and earn a Course Certificate from Coursera also are eligible to sign up for continuing education clock hours through the University of Minnesota.
Participants can earn 10 clock hours of continuing education credit (added cost $99) from the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota. Go here http://z.umn.edu/1a5q to register for continuing education clock hours for completing this course.

Week 1: Origins and Landmark Studies in the Science of Resilience in Children

The first module of this course provides an introduction to the course and to the science of resilience. Video lectures discuss the meaning of resilience and the origins of resilience science. Participants will begin to think about case examples of resilience from their own experience and plan for a resilience interview. In the forum discussions, participants will introduce themselves, discuss the meaning of resilience and its importance in their work. Participants also will nominate favorite films and books about true stories of resilience:

Impartido por:

Ann S. Masten, Ph.D., LP

Regents Professor, Irving B. Harris Professor of Child Development

Transcripción

Hello, everyone. In today's segment we're going to talk about defining resilience. How do we go, how do we define resilience? And before we begin, I want you to take a moment and think about an individual from your own life and experience who you believe has shown resilience in that person's life. And I want you to keep that person in mind as we go through this segment. You probably thought of someone who had experienced some sort of adversity, but who in your judgement is still managing to do okay or who has recovered well. And when scientists study resilience in human development, they do pretty much the same thing as you did when you thought of somebody. But they do it in a more systematic way. Whenever anyone thinks of an example of resilience or when a scientist tries to define resilience for research, they have to take two things into account to begin to make this definition. On the one hand, they have to define or think about risk or adversity. What kind of threats has the person experienced? Because resilience refers to good adaptation or recovery in a context of risk or adversity. If there's not been any risk or adversity, we might say a person is doing well. But we would probably not describe them as showing resilience. Scientists have considered many different kinds of risk factors and threats to human development, ranging from natural disasters to maltreatment in a child's home, to neglect and poverty. There's been many different kinds of adversities and we're going to look at data on many of these. Scientists, or you, when you were thinking of your example, also had some idea in mind about the kind of adaptation that meant that a person's life is going okay. One has to have criteria in order to evaluate or judge how well life is going. And investigators have used different kinds of criteria. And many of you watching this segment probably had different criteria, when you thought about your example of resilience. Some investigators have looked at academic or school achievement. Others have looked at mental health, or physical health. Some people have studied happiness. And some people have studied what are called developmental tasks, and I'll come back to that in a moment. So, given that there's all these different approaches to looking at or measuring these two key components of resilience, who decides on the definition? Or how we're going to measure resilience. And the answer to that question is really, whoever's doing the work, whoever's trying to think of the example. So when you were thinking about your example, you made that decision about resilience. But when scientists try to study resilience, they make decisions about how to define resilience. What their criteria are for risk on the one hand and good adaptation on the other hand. When people study resilience and they're trying to in children and they're trying to evaluate risk and adaptation they also consider many different kinds of adversities and many different kinds of criteria for doing well. And here's a few examples. They're very similar to what I talked about just a moment ago. One of the most popular though, that people like me consider. When we're judging how well a child's, or adult's life for that matter is going, is something called developmental tasks. What are developmental tasks? These are the expectations we have for children, in order to be doing well in life. So, some of our expectations for what children should be accomplishing, or doing, are universal, in the sense that all over the world, different cultures, different people, expect the same things. We expect, for example, that young infants and toddlers will learn to sit up and walk. That they'll learn to talk the language of their community. That they'll form an attachment bond with their caregivers. These are all universal human developmental tasks. We all expect this in our children around the world. As children get older, there are new developmental expectations for children. By which we decide if things are going okay. And in early childhood, young children learn to follow simple instructions. Parents are particularly interested in children o, obeying simple demands both for safety and to learn how you're supposed to behave in that society. Parents want their children to listen to them. And begin to follow their instructions. As children get older still, many of, children around the world go to school and when children go to school we have new expectations for them. They're expected to behave appropriately in the classroom. To learn something while they're at school. Many children are learning to read, to write and to do mathematics, and they're also learning to get along with the teacher and expect them to get along with other children. These are the developmental tasks of older, older children. In adolescence, we have even more expectations. Now children are growing and changing. Young people have to get used to the changes of puberty and adjust to their changing bodies and emotions. And many children go on into higher levels of education. Or begin their career training. And they learn the skills they need to take their place in adult society. They also form close friendships in adolescence and early adulthood that are important. Now, those are very common developmental tasks around the world. But there also are distinct developmental tasks that are more culturally influenced. That you would see in one culture and not another culture. And some of these, for example, are the rites of passage that cultures have to mark the transition from childhood to full adult status in a society. Their coming of age rituals and challenges that children are expected to meet to symbolize their maturity. There are also often religious rituals and practices that are expected of children as they take their place and grow up in societies. Children may be expected to learn a sacred text and then in the original language of that text, they may be expected to make a commitment to their faith or religion. And children also are expected to learn traditional skills and crafts that are very important for the livelihood of that culture. Might be learning to weave, to cook, to fish, to hunt in very special ways. Particular to that culture, or that environment. Here's a very basic definition of resilience in human development, based on those two components that I've been talking about. Doing well, or recovering well, after exposure to challenges that threaten function or development. This was a very common definition for many years in the study of resilience. And what's been happening over time is that people are shifting to a broader definition of resilience that works not just for children and adults, but also works for different kinds of systems. Here's a broad definition of resilience that, I think reflects this dynamic change. The capacity of a system to adapt successfully to disturbances that pose a threat to that system's stability, its life or its development. This kind of definition works when you're talking about an individual, an individual's resilience. But it also can work if you're interested in studying family resilience, community resilience, the resilience of an economy, the resilience of global climate. And the reason people are interested in this kind of definition is because it's scalable, it works. Whether you're talking about tiny systems within an individual's body or you're talking about large scale global systems. There's a growing recognition that the resilience of individual people is interdependent and related to the resilience of many other systems that they're interacting with. Systems in the community, systems in the world, communication systems and the environment in which you live. It's important to keep in mind when you use this kind of definition that human beings are living systems. We're, we're always changing. We're developing and changing all the time, all the way through our lives, and because of that, we are interacting and our resilience is changing as we interact with many other systems. This means, as we're going to see throughout the course, that resilience is going to change over time, and that the experiences people have, the developmental timing of, of a disaster, for example, how old a child is will influence whether or not that child shows resilience. This picture illustrates the idea that the resilience of a child is connected to many other systems. This picture is based on the theory of Urie Bronfenbrenner. Who made that point many years ago, that the development of a child is based on their interactions with many other systems of life, including their family, their classroom, and the environment around them. And what you see here is the child shown in blue. And there are systems briefly illustrated here within the child, like your brain systems, your cardiovascular system. But this child is part of other systems. This child is interacting with a group of friends over here. This child is part of a family that the child interacts with, and these other systems influence the development and behavior of that child, and as you can see in the rest of the picture, there are many other systems that children are connected to. They are connected to schools, they're connected to communities. Some of their connections are direct. A child that goes to the school and interacts with the teacher and other children, but some of their interactions are indirect meaning that, you know, a father or mother's workplace has effects on a child. But the child doesn't necessarily go to work with the parent. It affects the child because it affects the income of the family, and it affects how the parent is feeling, and that parent comes home and interacts with the child. So, there are many systems interacting with children over the life course, and we're going to see how these different systems contribute to resilience as we go along. [SOUND] But let's go back to your resilience example that you thought of at the very beginning. When you think about this individual that is an example of resilience. What do you think made it possible for this person to succeed or do well, or recover? What made a difference? This is the kind of question that drove the resilience scientist that, that's the, they were seeking answers to that kind of question. The wanted to know what makes a difference and they went off on a search for protective factors and processes that's still going on. What matters in the person, in the relationships, what matters in the community, in the physical environment, in societies. And even now, people are asking the question about what matters globally for resilience. And we're going to be talking about all these different levels of analysis throughout the course. One of the assignments for you this in this module is to do an interview on resilience. And there are instructions posted on our course website as well as three demonstration videos for you to watch. One demonstration in English, another in Mandarin, and another in Spanish. For full details take a look at the instructions about what you're going to do. But briefly what you're going to be asked to do is to invite a person to do a brief interview with you, probably will take less than five minutes. And you will ask that person to think of someone they know who has shown resilience and they won't tell you the name. You're just going to talk about a person with no name and you're going to ask questions about that person. And you're going to take notes. And when you're done with the interview later, you'll go fill out a little survey about what you learned about that particular case example, from your interview. And later on in the course, we're going to summarize the results of the interviews and surveys, so that you can see what kinds of examples, different members of the class learned about during the resilience interviews. [SOUND]